68 ideas
| 2474 | It seems likely that analysis of concepts is impossible, but justification can survive without it [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Lots of philosophers fear that if concepts don't have analyses, justification breaks down. My own guess is that concepts don't have analyses and that justification will survive all the same. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3 n2) |
| 2481 | Despite all the efforts of philosophers, nothing can ever be reduced to anything [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The general truth is that nothing ever reduces to anything, however hard philosophers may try. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) |
| 2505 | Turing invented the idea of mechanical rationality (just based on syntax) [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The most important thing that has happened in cognitive science was Turing's invention of the notion of mechanical rationality (because some inferences are rational in virtue of the syntax of their sentences). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) |
| 2470 | Transcendental arguments move from knowing Q to knowing P because it depends on Q [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Transcendental arguments ran: "If it weren't that P, we couldn't know (now 'say' or 'think' or 'judge') that Q; and we do know (now…) that Q; therefore P". Old and new arguments tend to be equally unconvincing, because of their empiricist preconceptions. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3) |
| 2469 | The world is full of messy small things producing stable large-scale properties (e.g. mountains) [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Damn near everything we know about the world (e.g. a mountain) suggests that unimaginably complicated to-ings and fro-ings of bits and pieces at the extreme microlevel manage somehow to converge on stable macrolevel properties. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: This is clearly true, and is a vital part of the physicalist picture of the mind. Personally I prefer the word 'processes' to 'properties', since no one seems to really know what a property is. A process is an abstraction from events. |
| 2475 | Don't define something by a good instance of it; a good example is a special case of the ordinary example [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It's a mistake to try to construe the notion of an instance in terms of the notion of a good instance (e.g. Platonic Forms); the latter is patently a special case of the former, so the right order of exposition is the other way round. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 4) |
| 13768 | Validity can preserve certainty in mathematics, but conditionals about contingents are another matter [Edgington] |
| Full Idea: If your interest in logic is confined to applications to mathematics or other a priori matters, it is fine for validity to preserve certainty, ..but if you use conditionals when arguing about contingent matters, then great caution will be required. | |
| From: Dorothy Edgington (Conditionals [2001], 17.2.1) |
| 13770 | There are many different conditional mental states, and different conditional speech acts [Edgington] |
| Full Idea: As well as conditional beliefs, there are conditional desires, hopes, fears etc. As well as conditional statements, there are conditional commands, questions, offers, promises, bets etc. | |
| From: Dorothy Edgington (Conditionals [2001], 17.3.4) |
| 13764 | Are conditionals truth-functional - do the truth values of A and B determine the truth value of 'If A, B'? [Edgington] |
| Full Idea: Are conditionals truth-functional - do the truth values of A and B determine the truth value of 'If A, B'? Are they non-truth-functional, like 'because' or 'before'? Do the values of A and B, in some cases, leave open the value of 'If A,B'? | |
| From: Dorothy Edgington (Conditionals [2001], 17.1) | |
| A reaction: I would say they are not truth-functional, because the 'if' asserts some further dependency relation that goes beyond the truth or falsity of A and B. Logical ifs, causal ifs, psychological ifs... The material conditional ⊃ is truth-functional. |
| 13765 | 'If A,B' must entail ¬(A & ¬B); otherwise we could have A true, B false, and If A,B true, invalidating modus ponens [Edgington] |
| Full Idea: If it were possible to have A true, B false, and If A,B true, it would be unsafe to infer B from A and If A,B: modus ponens would thus be invalid. Hence 'If A,B' must entail ¬(A & ¬B). | |
| From: Dorothy Edgington (Conditionals [2001], 17.1) | |
| A reaction: This is a firm defence of part of the truth-functional view of conditionals, and seems unassailable. The other parts of the truth table are open to question, though, if A is false, or they are both true. |
| 2502 | How do you count beliefs? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There is no agreed way of counting beliefs. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.16) |
| 2501 | Berkeley seems to have mistakenly thought that chairs are the same as after-images [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Berkeley seems to have believed that tables and chairs are logically homogeneous with afterimages. I assume that he was wrong to believe this. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.16) |
| 2465 | Maybe explaining the mechanics of perception will explain the concepts involved [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Why mightn't fleshing out the standard psychological account of perception itself count as learning what perceptual justification amounts to? | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 1) |
| 2504 | Rationalism can be based on an evolved computational brain with innate structure [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Pinker's rationalism involves four main ideas: mind is a computational system, which is massively modular with a lot of innate structure resulting from evolution. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) |
| 2493 | According to empiricists abstraction is the fundamental mental process [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: According to empiricists, the fundamental mental process is not theory construction but abstraction. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.12) |
| 2494 | Rationalists say there is more to a concept than the experience that prompts it [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: That there is more in the content of a concept than there is in the experiences that prompt us to form it is the burden of the traditional rationalist critique of empiricism (as worked out by Leibniz and Kant). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.12) |
| 2503 | Empirical approaches see mind connections as mirrors/maps of reality [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Empirical approaches to cognition say the human mind is a blank slate at birth; experiences write on the slate, and association extracts and extrapolates trends from the record of experience. The mind is an image of statistical regularities of the world. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |
| A reaction: The 'blank slate' is an exaggeration. The mind at least has the tools to make associations. He tries to make it sound implausible, but the word 'extrapolates' contains a wealth of possibilities that could build into a plausible theory. |
| 2508 | The function of a mind is obvious [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Like hands, you don't have to know how the mind evolved to make a pretty shrewd guess at what it's for; for example, that it's to think with. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |
| A reaction: I like this. This is one of the basic facts of philosophy of mind, and it frequently gets lost in the fog. It is obvious that the components of the mind (say, experience and intentionality) will be better understood if their function is remembered. |
| 2485 | Do intentional states explain our behaviour? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Intentional Realism is the idea that our intentional mental states causally explain our behaviour; so holistic semantics (which says no two people have the same intentional states, or share generalisations) is irrealistic about intentional mental states. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: ...presumably because two people CAN have the same behaviour. The key question would be whether the intentional states have to be conscious. |
| 2506 | If I have a set of mental modules, someone had better be in charge of them! [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |
| A reaction: Dennett quotes this as a quaintly old-fashioned view. I agree quite strongly with Fodor, for reasons that Dennett should like - evolutionary ones. A mind is a useless tool without central co-ordination. What makes my long-term plans? It isn't anarchy! |
| 2467 | Functionalists see pains as properties involving relations and causation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Functionalists claim that pains and the like are higher-order, relational properties that things have in virtue of the pattern of causal interactions that they (can or do) enter into. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: The whole idea of a property being purely 'relational' strikes me as dubious (or even nonsense). "Is north of" is a relation, but it is totally derived from more basical physical geographical properties. |
| 2489 | Why bother with neurons? You don't explain bird flight by examining feathers [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Compare Churchland's strategy rooted in neurological modelling with "if it's flight you want to understand, what you need to look at is feathers". | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: Sounds good, but may be a false analogy. You learn a lot about snake movement if you examine their scales. |
| 2468 | Type physicalism is a stronger claim than token physicalism [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: "Type" physicalism is supposed, by general consensus, to be stronger than "token" physicalism; stronger, that is, than the mere claim that all mental states are necessarily physically instantiated. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: Such philosopher's terminology always seems cut-and-dried, until you ask exactly what is identical to what. The word 'type' is a very broad concept. Are trees the same type of thing as roses? A thought always requires the same 'type' of brain event? |
| 2490 | Modern connectionism is just Hume's theory of the 'association' of 'ideas' [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Churchland is pushing a version of connectionism ….in which if you think of the elements as "ideas" and call the connections between them "associations", you've got a psychology that is no great advance on David Hume. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: See Fodor's book 'Humean Variations' on how Hume should be improved. This idea strikes me as important for understanding Hume, who is very reticent about what his real views are on the mind. |
| 2476 | The goal of thought is to understand the world, not instantly sort it into conceptual categories [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The question whether there are recognitional concepts is really the question what thought is for - for directing action, or for discerning truth. And Descartes was right on this: the goal of thought is to understand the world, not to sort it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 4) |
| 2499 | Modules analyse stimuli, they don't tell you what to do [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The thinking involved in "figuring out" what to do is a quite different kind of mental process than the stimulus analysis that modules perform. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: My PA theory fits this perfectly. My inner assistant keeps providing information about needs, duties etc., but takes no part in my decisions. Psychology must include the Will. |
| 2496 | Blindness doesn't destroy spatial concepts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Blind children are not, in general, linguistically impaired; not even in their talk about space. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This is offered to demonstrate that spatial concepts are innate, even in the blind. But then we would expect anyone who has to move in space to develop spatial concepts from experience. |
| 2497 | Something must take an overview of the modules [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is not plausible that the mind could be made only of modules; one does sometimes manage to balance one's checkbook, and there can't be an innate, specialized intelligence for doing that. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: I agree strongly with this. My own mind strikes me as being highly modular, but as long as I am aware of the output of the modules, I can pass judgement. The judger is more than a 'module'. |
| 2509 | Modules have in-built specialist information [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Modules contain lots of specialized information about the problem domains that they compute in. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |
| A reaction: At this point we must be cautious about modularity. I doubt whether 'information' is the right word. I think 'specialized procedures' might make more sense. |
| 2491 | Modules have encapsulation, inaccessibility, private concepts, innateness [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The four essential properties of modules are: encapsulation (information doesn't flow, as in the persistence of illusions); inaccessibility (unreportable); domain specificity (they have private concepts); innateness (genetically preprogrammed). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: If they have no information flow, and are unreportable and private, this makes empirical testing of Fodor's hypothesis a little tricky. He must be on to something, though. |
| 2495 | Obvious modules are language and commonsense explanation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The best candidates for the status of mental modules are language (the first one, put there by Chomsky), commonsense biology, commonsense physics, commonsense psychology, and aspects of visual form perception. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: My favourite higher level module is my Personal Assistant, who keeps nagging me to do sundry things, only some of which I agree to. It is an innate superego, but still a servant of the Self. |
| 2498 | Modules make the world manageable [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Modules function to present the world to thought under descriptions that are germane to the success of behaviour. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: "Descriptions" might be a bold word to use about something so obscure, but this pinpoints the evolutionary nature of modularity theory, to which I subscribe. |
| 2500 | Babies talk in consistent patterns [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: "Who Mummy love?" is recognizably baby talk; but "love Mummy who?" is not. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: Not convincing. If she is embracing Daddy, and asking baby, she might get the answer "Daddy", after a bit of coaxing. Who knows what babies up the Amazon respond to? |
| 2507 | Rationality rises above modules [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Probably, modular computation doesn't explain how minds are rational; it's just a sort of precursor. You work through it to get a view of how horribly hard our rationality is to understand. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |
| A reaction: The choice is between a Self which weighs and judges the inputs, or merely decisions that automatically result from the balance of inputs. The latter seems unlikely. Vetoes are essential. |
| 2483 | Mentalese doesn't require a theory of meaning [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mentalese doesn't need Grice's theory of natural-language meaning, or indeed any theory of natural-language meaning whatsoever. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: Presumably what is represented by mentalese is a quite separate question from whether there exists a mentalese that does some sort of representing. Sounds plausible. |
| 2480 | Language is ambiguous, but thought isn't [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Thinking can't just be in sequences of English words since, notoriously, thought needs to be ambiguity-free in ways that mere word sequences are not. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a strong argument in favour of (at least) propositions. Thoughts are unambiguous, but their expression need not be. Sentences could be expanded to achieve clarity. |
| 2487 | Mentalese may also incorporate some natural language [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I don't think it is true that all thought is in Mentalese. It is quite likely (e.g. in arithmetic algorithms) that Mentalese co-opts bits of natural language. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: Presumably language itself would have to be coded in mentalese. If there is some other way for thought to work, the whole mind could use it, and skip mentalese. |
| 2486 | Content can't be causal role, because causal role is decided by content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Functional role semantics wants to analyze the content of a belief in terms of its inferential (causal) relations; but that seems the wrong way round. The content of a belief determines its causal role. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: This is one of my favourite ideas, which keeps coming to mind when considering functional accounts of mental life. The buck of explanation must, however, stop somewhere. |
| 2492 | Experience can't explain itself; the concepts needed must originate outside experience [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Experience can't explain itself; eventually, some of the concepts that explaining experience requires have to come from outside it. Eventually, some of them have to be built in. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.12) |
| 2471 | Are concepts best seen as capacities? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Virtually all modern theorists about philosophy, mind or language tend to agree that concepts are capacities, in particular concepts are epistemic capacities. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: This view seems to describe concepts in functional terms, which generates my perennial question: what is it about concepts that enables them to fulfil that particular role? |
| 2472 | For Pragmatists having a concept means being able to do something [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It's a paradigmatically Pragmatist idea that having a concept consists in being able to do something. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: If you defined a bicycle simply by what you could do with it, you wouldn't explain much. I wonder if pragmatism and functionalism come from the same intellectual stable? |
| 2482 | It seems unlikely that meaning can be reduced to communicative intentions, or any mental states [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Nobody now thinks that the reduction of the meaning of English sentences to facts about the communicative intentions of English speakers - or to any facts about mental states - is likely to go through. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: Most attempts at 'reduction' of meaning seem to go rather badly. I assume it would be very difficult to characterise 'intentions' without implicit reference to meaning. |
| 2477 | If to understand "fish" you must know facts about them, where does that end? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If learning that fish typically live in streams is part of learning "fish", typical utterances of "pet fish" (living in bowls) are counterexamples. This argument iterates (e.g "big pet fish"). So learning where they live can't be part of learning "fish". | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: Using 'typical' twice is rather misleading here. Town folk can learn 'fish' as typically living in bowls. There is no one way to learn a word meaning. |
| 2473 | Analysis is impossible without the analytic/synthetic distinction [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If there is no analytic/synthetic distinction then there are no analyses. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: There are no precise analyses. I see no reason why a holistic view of language prohibits the careful elucidation of key concepts in the system. It's just a bit fluid. |
| 2484 | The theory of the content of thought as 'Mentalese' explains why the Private Language Argument doesn't work [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a Private Language Argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: Presumably Mentalese implies that all language is, in the first instance, intrinsically private. Dogs, for example, need Mentalese, since they self-evidently think. |
| 23616 | Legal excuses are duress, ignorance, and diminished responsibility [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: The common legal practice is to distinguish three broad categories of excuse: duress, epistemic limitation, and diminished responsibility. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 3.2.1) | |
| A reaction: McMahan cites these with reference to soldiers in wartime, but they have general application. The third one seems particularly open to very wide interpretation. Presumably I can't be excused by just being irresponsible. |
| 23606 | Liberty Rights are permissions, and Claim Rights are freedom from intervention [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: There are two types of right. A Liberty right is merely a permission, meaning it is not wrong to do it. But a Claim right is a right against intervention, meaning no one has a liberty right to prevent it. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: There must also be a third type of right, which requires other people to perform actions on your behalf. If you pay for a book in a shop, you must then be given the book. |
| 23619 | A defensive war is unjust, if it is responding to a just war [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: It is possible for a defensive war to be unjust, when the defensive war to which it is a response is a just war. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 3.3.3) | |
| A reaction: An example might be a state resisting an intervention from outside, when the state is in the process of exterminating some unwanted minority. Or perhaps the invaders are crossing the state's territory to achieve some admirable end. |
| 23595 | The worst unjustified wars have no aim at all [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: The most serious reason why a war might be unjustified is that it lacks any justifying aim at all. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: It seems that Louis XIV invaded the Netherlands in around 1674 purely to enhance his own glory. That strikes me as worse. I supposed Ghenghis Khan invaded places simply because he enjoyed fighting. |
| 23620 | A person or state may be attacked if they are responsible for an unjustified threat [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: It is a necessary condition of liability to defensive attack that one be morally responsible for posing an objectively unjustified threat. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 4.1.1) | |
| A reaction: This implies that one may not actually be doing the threatening (but merely ordering it, or enabling it). McMahan aims to have the same criteria for wartime as for peacetime. He denies Anscombe's claim that merely posing the threat is enough. |
| 23598 | You (e.g. a police officer) are not liable to attack just because you pose a threat [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: It is false that by posing a threat to another, one necessarily makes oneself liable to defensive action. A police officer who shoots an active murderer does not thereby by make herself liable to defensive action. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This is one of his arguments against the moral equality of combatants. It is not morally OK to shoot all the local soldiers when you unjustly invade a territory. Sounds right to me. |
| 23594 | Wars can be unjust, despite a just cause, if they are unnecessary or excessive or of mixed cause [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: Wars can be unjust despite having a just cause, because they are not actually needed, or they will cause excessive harm, or they also pursue some unjust causes. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The point is that older writers often think that a 'just cause' is sufficient. He is obviously right. |
| 23597 | Just war theory says all and only persons posing a threat are liable to attack [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: In mainstream just war theory (Anscombe, Nagel, Walzer) the criterion of liability to attack is simply posing a threat. Since all combatants pose a threat to each other, they are morally liable to attack; because noncombatants do not, they are not liable. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: McMahan says that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets rests mostly on this basis. The problem is that a huge range of unarmed people can also pose various degrees of threat. |
| 23600 | Proportionality in fighting can't be judged independently of the justice of each side [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: There is simply no satisfactory understanding of proportionality in war that can be applied independently of whether the acts that are evaluated support a just or an unjust cause. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: He rejects traditional just war theory, which sees both sides as morally equal in combat, and hence equally subject to the principles of proportional response. But the just can then be harsher, when their just principles should make them milder. |
| 23603 | Can an army start an unjust war, and then fight justly to defend their own civilians? [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: There is a paradox if the unjust are justified in fighting the just in order to protect their own civilians who have been endangered by the starting of an unjust war. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: [my summary of MacMahan pp.48-49] It suggests that in a war there may be local concepts of justice which are at odds with the general situation - which is the ad bellum/in bello distinction. But this is the justice of fighting, not how it is conducted. |
| 23611 | Soldiers cannot freely fight in unjust wars, just because they behave well when fighting [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: We must stop reassuring soldiers that they act permissibly when they fight in an unjust war, provided that they conduct themselve honorably on the battlefield by fighting in accordance with the rules of engagement. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 2.8) | |
| A reaction: This culminates McMahan's arguments against the moral equality of combatants, and against the sharp division of justice of war from justice in war. How rare it is for philosophy to culminate in a policy recommendation! |
| 23612 | The law of war differs from criminal law; attacking just combatants is immoral, but legal [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: Unlike domestic criminal law, the law of war is designed not to protect moral rights but to prevent harm. …This means when unjust combatants attack just combatants they violate their moral rights, yet they act within their legal rights. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 3.1.1) | |
| A reaction: He says we must bring the law of war much closer to the morality of war. If there is any hope of slowly eliminating war, it may lie in reforms such as these. |
| 23617 | If the unjust combatants are morally excused they are innocent, so how can they be killed? [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: If most unjust combatants are morally innocent because they are excused, and if it is wrong to intentionally kill morally innocent people, then a contingent form of pacificism may be inescapable. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 3.3.1) | |
| A reaction: A very nice argument against the moral equality of combatants. If I think we are the good guys, and the opposing troops are no morally different from us, how can I possibly kill them? |
| 23599 | You don't become a legitimate target, just because you violently resist an unjust attack [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: It is hard to see how just combatants could become legitimate targets simply by offering violent resistance to unjust attacks by unjust coombatants. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: It is, however, hard to criticise a soldier who is dragged into fighting for an unjust cause, and then kills just defenders in the course of the fight. Once the bullets fly, normal morality seems to be suspended. Just survive. |
| 23596 | If all combatants are seen as morally equal, that facilitates starting unjust wars [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: It would be naïve to doubt that the widespread acceptance of the moral equality of combatants has facilitated the ability of governments to fight unjust wars. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: The point is that their armies are both compliant and seeing their actions as guiltless, which makes them perfect tools for evil. McMahan's ideal is an army which asks sharp questions about the justification of the war, before they fight it. |
| 23604 | Volunteer soldiers accept the risk of attack, but they don't agree to it, or to their deaths [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: When soldiers go to war, they undoubtedly assume a certain risk. They voluntarily expose themselves to a significant risk of being attacked. But this is entirely different from consenting to being attacked. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 2.2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is his response to Walzer's thought that soldiers resemble people who volunteer for a boxing match. The sailors at Pearl Harbour obviously didn't consent to the attack, or accept the Japanese right to kill them. |
| 23608 | If being part of a big collective relieves soldiers of moral responsibility, why not the leaders too? [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: If acting as an agent of a political collective justifies the combatants fighting an unjust war, that should also release the leaders from responsibility for their role in the fighting of that war. No one ever explains why this is not so. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: At the very least there seems to be a problem of the cut off point between innocent soldiers and culpable leaders. Which rank in the army or executive triggers the blame? |
| 23610 | If soldiers can't refuse to fight in unjust wars, can they choose to fight in just wars? [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: There is a certain symmetry here. The permissibility of disobeying a command to fight in an unjust war suggests the permissibility of disobeying a command not to fight in a just war. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: The argument considered here is that since we could never allow soldiers to choose to fight in their own wars, we similarly cannot let them opt out of the official wars. Implying obedience is absolute. Soldiers don't get to 'choose' anything! |
| 23613 | Equality is both sides have permission, or both sides are justified, or one justified the other permitted [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: Moral equality means either 1) because just combatants are permitted to fight in a just way, so are the unjust , or 2) because the just are justified, so are the unjust, or 3) because the just are justified, the unjust are therefore permitted. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: [summary] McMahan calls 1) the weak version, and 2) the strong. He suggests that although 3) is unusual, it is what most people believe - that if the good are justified, the bad are permitted to fight back. He rejects them all. |
| 23615 | Fighting unjustly under duress does not justify it, or permit it, but it may excuse it [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: It is said that combatants are compelled to fight; they have no choice. But duress is not a justification; nor does it ground a permission - not even a subjective permission. It is, instead, an excusing condition. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: The 'subjective' permission is believing you are just, even if you aren't. A nice, accurate and true distinction made by McMahan, I think. It is roughly our postwar attitude to the Nazi army. |
| 23605 | Soldiers cannot know enough facts to evaluate the justice of their war [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: When soldiers are commanded to fight, they cannot reasonably be expected to have the factual knowledge necessary to evaluate the war as just or unjust. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: This is part of the 'epistemic' justification for a soldier to fight in an unjust war. Sometimes soldiers do have enoough knowledge, especially if they join up late on in a war, when they have studied and observed its progress. |
| 23602 | Innocence implies not being morally responsible, rather than merely being guiltless [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: My alternative conception is that one is 'innocent' if one is neither morally responsible for nor guilty of a wrong. Classical theory focused on guilt, but I think we should focus on moral responsibility (which is something less). | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: This seems to make the supporters of evil equally liable to attack with its perpetrators. But you can observe perpetration a lot more easily than you can observe support. |
| 23618 | Unconditional surrender can't be demanded, since evil losers still have legitimate conditions [McMahan] |
| Full Idea: Achieving unconditional surrender can never be a justification for the continuation of war, since there are always conditions that a vanquished adversary, no matter how evil, can be justified in demanding. | |
| From: Jeff McMahan (Killing in War [2009], 3.3.1) | |
| A reaction: McMahan is particularly discussing Hiroshima, but this also applies to the European war in 1945. Presumably a civilised victor will grant the conditions which the losers would have demanded, and that probably happened in 1945. It's about power. |